At last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the highlight presentation for me was one given by Kathleen Culver and Greg Lowe from Alcatel Lucent. Their presentation was an excellent look at some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0, and then some of the detrimental impacts that those benefits can bring.

Last week I posted about one of these very pitfalls, telling the tale of social media being used in a professional setting by a bully trying to build themselves up by dragging others down. Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council founding member, practitioner and thought-leader Susan Scrupski left a comment reminding me of the presentation Greg and Kathleen gave. I reached out to Greg who graciously agreed to let me use the presentation and write a blog post around it.

What’s interesting for me about their presentation is that, despite there being some skepticism about Enterprise 2.0 generally, most commentators are couching that skepticism in terms of “where is the value” type questions – looking to prove the real benefit from the tools we’re all evangelizing, These commentators tend to be a little hypocritical, using these social media tools to build their own personal brands while at the same time pouring scorn on the value of the same tools within the enterprise.

Kathleen and Greg however take the benefits the tools bring as a given, but then parse those benefits in terms of some real risks that go alongside them. They do so along several themes – flexibility, accessibility (both geographical and chronological, context specificity, information availability and retrievability.

Key is their summary – bear in mind these are two Enterprise 2.0 proponents who, despite understanding the risks, still see the value in the tools. Their advice in order to mitigate the risks?

Avoid “Alert Fatigue”

Unplug yourself

Focus on your audience

Make your smile count (in person)

Don’t be stupid (watch what you type)

Kathleen helpfully provided a link to the references they used in the talk. Again this reiterates a bit of a theme of mine relating to the perils of enterprise 2.0 definitely not a reason to avoid using the tools but something to bear in mind.

As part of a new offering that fellow CloudAve blogger Krishnan Subramanian and I are developing, I’m looking at doing some work in this space in the next few months – hoping to develop some whitepapers and practitioner guides touching on these issues – watch this space for more.

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Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.